AZquotes claims that Lord Kelvin (or William Thomson) said this:
If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.
But there is no such a quote in his Wikiquote page. So did he actually say this?
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2Actually, the quote is mentioned on Wikiquote—but only on the talk page. It's implied there that the quote is a corruption of "...but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind..." which is the first quote listed on the main page.– LaurelSep 30, 2018 at 18:24
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2@Laurel that should be an answer– mmmmmmSep 30, 2018 at 21:52
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I haven’t checked whether other sources repeat this claim, but that doesn’t seem sufficiently notable.– Andrew GrimmOct 1, 2018 at 10:53
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@AndrewGrimm how do you define sufficiently notable?– OokerOct 1, 2018 at 11:42
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1 Answer
He didn't say that exact quote; Lord Kelvin tended towards rambling, so if you see any particularly pithy one-liner quotes, it probably wasn't him. His actual quote?
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.
The actual source is from Antoine-Augustin Cournot, in De l’origine et des limites de la correspondance entre l’algèbre et la géométrie (1847), 375.
